Driving Growth on a bootstrap startup budget

A new organization, Ubiqi Health is building tools to track migraines, triggers, and treatments online or on your mobile phone. Their current biggest challenge is acquiring new users that match the same eagerness and intensity as their early-vangelists, in a low-cost manner. As a startup marketing guy, I felt I could help out. In this first part of a conversation with Jackie Thong, founder at Ubiqi Heath, we talked about how to setup a user acquisition tracking system. This post recaps our discussion of driving new visits and users through the system.

Ok, once we build our AARRR dashboard, how do we attract new users?

Ubiqi is still attracting new users by building partnerships with people who can recommend the product to chunks of people - moderators of online user groups, influential doctors, and offline communities. While that is a great way to get some early hypotheses validated around your market and MVP, I recommend that Ubiqi start incorporating an Inbound Marketing Strategy (Lite). Doing Inbound Marketing "the right way" requires a huge time commitment that would not pay off for a startup before the money runs out. However, the inbound, digital channel shouldn’t just be ignored.

Ubiqi uses their blog to talk about the product and their Facebook page to talk about the problem their product solves. I recommend that you flip that approach. As David Meerman Scott so eloquently puts, "Nobody cares about your product, except for you." Take the content that people are more likely to be searching for, and put that in a search optimized, frequently updating, publicly accessible blog. This will pull people towards your product more effectively.

The definition of "Frequent Updates" to the blog is always murky - especially for a startup where time is the scarcest resource. There are a lot of great ideas on how you can train yourself to regularly update your blog with an editorial calendar- or get others to blog for you- by asking for guest authors, and more.

Start by agreeing to an editorial calendar that has the whole team committing to 4 total posts per month. If there are at least four people in your startup, that is 1 post per person, per month. Have each person write about the "problem" from their unique perspective of their functional role.

Should we experiment with PPC?

Grabbing lots of users by investing in a daily PPC budget that you can "set and forget" is a trap that many startups flirt with, at some point. From my experience, the steps that are required to set up a Google Adwords campaign and get it running require all of 5 minutes. Do not let that fool you, the steps required to correctly setup a PPC campaign, that results in something other than just handing over your money to Google, are a lot more involved. Tread lightly.

Poorly configured PPC campaigns can waste the two most scarce startup resources - time and money. Properly tuned PPC campaigns require banners and ad messaging that truly stand-out from the pack, stellar landing page designs, crisp value propositions specific to the Ad content, and accurate data that demonstrates your campaigns' effectiveness through a series of A/B tests, and dedicated time out of your schedule to monitor your campaigns every day, is what needs to be done.

All it takes is time . . . and money

After talking for an hour or so, the meeting ended with lots of notes on the page. I felt that I was able to help outline a decent user acquisition strategy in broad brush strokes. But I also felt at times that I was overwhelming Jackie with just a bunch of to-do's that might have gotten lost without overall context.

Learning: From this article, we learn how important targeted user acquisition is for startups such as Ubiqi Health. This helps in balancing cost-efficient methodologies with sustainable growth, thereby driving potential for success. The role of partnerships, focus on boosting content marketing, and carefully handling PPC campaigns in saving resources is paramount. Those striving to create such a startup must focus on consistency, and develop strategic content, while also prioritizing performance monitoring as these help in creating a solid user base.